


Say Nothing But I Told You So

by duh_i_read (duh_i_write)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Post Season 6, Prose Poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-12
Updated: 2011-11-12
Packaged: 2017-10-25 23:38:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duh_i_write/pseuds/duh_i_read
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time will say nothing but I told you so- W.H Auden</p>
            </blockquote>





	Say Nothing But I Told You So

**Author's Note:**

> In honor of 11/11/11, I wrote Who fic. Of course my first time writing for Doctor Who, and I write melancholy present tense prose. I regret nothing.

The Doctor taunts Time. A quick hand and a quicker mind and _there’s no card up my sleeve._ Distractions, while he tucks his knave of hearts in the library. He thinks then, his trick will be temporary,wiggle one hand while the other holds her safe.

Saved.

Paused. Waiting. Waiting for him to come up with a better plan, a more clever plan, even cleverer than his sleight of hand with death. She can wait a bit. Runs in her  family, waiting; pours in her family, around her family where it falls into the bottomless decanter of his guilt, fermenting in that familiar bitter brew which thickly coats the tongues of his past regenerations.

River was in the library, He thought and schemed and plotted improbable things to extract her, but River is in the library,  
will be in the library.

Still. Saved.

He is a Lord of Time, he can dodge, slip, twirl around Time, twist it in tangles and run. Time can’t catch him, not for long and always by the coattails leaving him to slide away. He is the Lord of Time, he tells Time _no, not me, not today_ ; it is always today and today and today and never Sundays and as many yesterdays as there ever were or would be.

Yet, he does not keep Time. He gambles and borrows and steals Time, spreading it about and stretching it thin as optic fiber, looping around his friends and lovers like a net.

Or a noose.  The loose threads once crisscrossing round him and River for lifetimes now stretches in a morass so tight he dare not touch one strand. What could he do but hitch her to the heart of the Library?

Time will have nothing to say to such a question.

Accept. The one he tried so hard to forget: the word lingering in the shell of prominent ears, only to graze shorn sideburns, then lay like a kiss against an old old man suited in a young man’s skin: the impossible syllables of his name, heavy like waiting for the noose to snap taut and knowing, one day, it will.


End file.
